2 TEXTS, 3 READERS - DISTANCE AND EXPERTISE IN READING HISTORY

Historians are extraordinary, rather than typical, readers who routine ly engage in the self-conscious, directed reading and rereading of his torical documents, moving iteratively between documents and their own historical theories about an issue. This study was designed to compare the reading practices of historians reading highly familiar privilege d texts with those reading familial but unfamiliar texts, and to deter mine when and how historians use general historical knowledge versus t opic-specific expertise. Two expert historians were asked to select a document critical to their current work and then to read and interpret their own document (close) and a colleague's selection (far). A third historian read the two unfamiliar texts as a control. Our expectation s were confirmed: (a) Historians have general document-reading knowled ge that includes schemas for identification and interpretation, (b) hi storians' general knowledge dynamically interacts with their topic-spe cific expertise, (c) historians read familiar and unfamiliar documents differently, and (d) historians read intertextually. We found evidenc e that identification is supported by action systems for classificatio n, corroboration, sourcing, and contextualization and that interpretat ion is supported by action systems for a textual and a historical read . We also saw that historians have strategies for reading a document a s text, as artifact, and as member of a set of related texts, and that their schema use and text sampling differed when reading familiar and unfamiliar texts. Although historians, like all readers, construct te xtbase and situation models as they read, the manner in which they do so reveals the nature and extent of their expertise. Our task analysis provides an exemplar to contemplate: evidence of how historians actua lly know and do what we hope students may come to know and do. We conc lude with recommendations for how history teachers may engage students in two particularly promising activities: reading across multiple rel ated documents to construct a coherent historical account and the deep analytic reading of a single critical or privileged document,